The SB Live 1024 works fine with OSS, but it was off the SuSE list that I had the recommendation that ALSA was far better, maybe I'll stick with OSS at least it's working - one problem sorted.
Some people think ALSA is a better architecture, others don't much care. Me, I'm in the don't care camp. The ALSA driver for my laptop's sound card was broken but OSS worked fine. So I use OSS. The ALSA driver has now been fixed, but I've no intention of switching. Why bother? Sometimes you get better sound with one system over the other, but because it's all open source anyway, they often just use each other's code. I'd say you should just use OSS and move onto another problem.
The scanner has the facility for both USB & Parallel so as soon as I can get SANE to run there might be a chance of success.Still waiting for the manufacturers support line to reply!!
I've a feeling you'll be waiting for ever, unless they specifically say they support the scanner's use under Linux. Welcome to the biggest problem Linux faces today. Most Linux users go out of their way to choose components from vendors who support Linux. The SANE web page is at http://www.mostang.com/sane/. I would suggest you go there and join the mailing list. I've not used Yast to set up SANE, but I did it by hand and it was a real game, so I'd be suprised if Yast can automate it cleanly.
Non running progs. I was under the impression (wrongly ??) that if a prog was displayed in a KDE menu then it has been installed. I did the "default" installation.
No, you're wrong. It's really stupid, and I've criticised SuSE on this issue before. They install the desktop as a package, and that package contains the menu config files. Those config files should be adjusted to take into account what files are and are not on the system. But they're not adjusted, so newbies end up in with the confusion you have. This is daft, daft, daft. You have 2 options. Install "just about everything" using Yast - if you have the disk space. If you don't, do a search in Yast's package manager for the thing you want (a name or keyword should find it, otherwise ask here), then install the package(s) for that utility.
I think the major problem I first have to overcome is getting Yast to install the kpackage patch, without this I can't do anything.
I assume you have downloaded the new version of kpackage as an .rpm file from the SuSE update site? If so, switch to root in a terminal and issue the rpm utility's update command directly: rpm -Uvh whatever-you-called-it.rpm This will install the new kpackage as an upgrade. This is exactly what Yast will do if you ever get it to play ball. If there's a problem doing this (and there might be if Yast is getting upset) you'll be able to post the error messages to this list. -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/